Читать книгу Priestess Itfut - Вадим Зеланд - Страница 5

The glamrocks walked in silence encircling Matilda in a tight crowd but still keeping some distance from her. It was a strange sight. The gray figures with their wax faces and among them a blue blonde wearing a pink bow. It was a truly phantasmagorical procession consisting of a living doll surrounded by mannequins.

You would never say of Matilda that she was just a barbie doll. Some people are pretty, and others are beautiful. It is the difference between form and content. Matilda was one of those people who just have something about them.

But the main thing distinguishing her from the overall picture was not so much her colorful silhouette against the ‘black and white cinema’ background, so much as her life-force. Everything else including the gray figures was not so much dead as lifeless if one could put it that way. The other world probably looked much like this – not that different from our own – it was just different because it was ‘on the other side’. The question is, on the other side of what?

That question remains unanswered for now. Matilda was not concerned about the physics of such phenomena right in this moment. Her mind was filled with anxious thoughts about what would happen next. By virtue of some fated coincidence, she had ended up in a foreign world and it was not yet clear how she might escape. She could see nothing on which to pin any hope. What should she expect from her sinister companions? She dared not imagine.

The glamrocks’ faces expressed grim determination to find out for themselves something that could cost Matilda her life. Although the glamrocks were not touching Matilda, they looked at her with suspicion. One of those walking in front turned around, stuck out his tongue and cried out, “Synthetic maid!”, no doubt out of habit. But then he got a slap. The maid was supposed to be left untouched until it had finally been determined who she really was: ‘mana’ or simply an edible maid.

Matilda’s situation was aggravated by the fact that she was desperate to go to the toilet. ‘At least I only want a number one for now’, she thought. ‘But there’s the thing. How to go about it? What sex are they, I wonder?’ She had not observed any outward indication of gender. And then she was struck by a terrible thought. They might not only eat her but abuse her body to their hearts’ content, who knows in what awful ways.

She trotted along hurriedly in her platform shoes and stubbed her toe against a rock. The poor girl would have given anything to be back in her own world again. ‘I’ll never be capricious again.’ she thought. ‘I’ll be obedient in everything. I’ll never take off my wonderful bow ever again. I’ll do anything, just send me back!’

Remembering the bow, she experienced again that same weird feeling in her back. It was not clear why, but it seemed to give her strength and for some reason caused Matilda to feel that she had the ability to control events. It was as if she could choose what came into being and what did not.

She suddenly realized that she was separate from everything that surrounded her and all that was happening to her. She was the reality in which she found herself. She existed of herself, independently just as reality did. Matilda suddenly understood, not with her mind but with all her being, that here, she had ended up in a book and she was supposed to wander through the pages playing out the plot.

It was like a movie, which you watch as you immerse yourself in a fictional reality. If you concede and give yourself over to what is happening, you have no other choice than to play the role assigned to you. But what if Matilda chose not to? What if she remained separate and the movie separate from her?

’Can this really be my reality?’ thought Matilda. ‘No, this is not my reality. Something is wrong. This kind of thing happens in dreams, but this is not a dream. Although what difference does it make, for God’s sake? Everything will be all right with me, whatever happens. I don’t know how, but I know I’ll be ok. I have no other choice. What other option is there? That’s what I’ve decided, period!’

Immediately after this thought, something happened. To her surprise, Matilda noticed a slanting black strip flash from the sky down to the ground as if some unknown force had turned the page on reality. The gray ones seemed to pay no attention to it and continued their same grim procession as if nothing had happened. Matilda, however, suddenly felt much better and was confident that from now on everything would be all right.

Meanwhile, they reached the buildings they had been heading towards. It was not a town or a village but something quite odd. Everywhere, there were simple, cubic houses with smooth, gray walls made from a material Matilda did not recognize. The houses were interspersed with empty recesses with the same cubic frame. And there were stairways everywhere, some leading up to the rooftops, others down into pits, and still others twisting senselessly and disappearing into nowhere. The fanciful intertwining of cubic structures and niches along with the many stairways created an absurd scene.

By an indirect route, crossing from one stairway to another, they exited onto what looked to be the only open space, a square, in the middle of which stood a construction, no less strange than anything else in this peculiar place. The construction was a black monolith with an oval perimeter enclosed by protruding columns, which bent gently upwards to form a ribbed dome.

By all appearances, this was the very same ‘sacred hlevjun’ although its sinister form was more reminiscent of a spaceship. The glamrocks could not have built such a structure themselves, or the rest of the city for that matter.

In the same moment that the procession approached the megalith, the construction produced a startlingly powerful trumpet sound in a low tone, which permeated the surrounding space. As soon as the sound reached the glamrocks’ ears, they began to fuss and rushed inside. Matilda followed them with a mixture of curiosity and fear.

The megalith had the same form inside as it did on the outside. The black pillars that extended outwards from the walls rose smoothly upwards into a high dome. A green glow emanated somewhere from a niche near the floor. The floor was black and as smooth as a mirror. The place was empty except for a single element at the center which looked to be a rectangular-shaped altar or plinth made of the same material as the floor. A head was growing up out of the plinth, bald and gray like the glamrocks.

The head writhed with grimaces not making a sound. The glamrocks surrounded the altar, shoved Matilda inside the circle, fell to their knees and with raised hands began making invocations.

“Glamo’c! Mana-glamo’c!”

Without changing its expression from a grimace, the head spoke in a low bass tone.

“Read gibberish. You must not read the letter. I am mana. I can. But you can’t.

Mana-veda, mana-sana, mana-una, mana-mana.

Mana-oma, ata-mana, mana-okha, mana-dana.”

The glamrocks muttered the mantra obediently repeating the words the head spoke.

“Mana-oga, makha-mana, mana-osha, mana-shana,” continued the glamorck (obviously, this was him). “Read gibberish.Then you will be full. Don’t do the things that aren’t allowed, otherwise there’ll be a crash!“

The savages put their heads in their hands and groaned.

“Aboo! It’s aboo!”

“Who is mana here?” asked the head. “Who do you need to kiss around here?”

“Glamo’c! Mana-glamo’c!” they responded and began rubbing their faces along the floor, mercilessly squashing their noses.

“Praise me!” the glamorc shouted ominously, accompanying the words with horrible grimacing and sending out a monotonous murmur. “О-a-oo-khomm, о-a-oo-homm.”

“О-a-oo-khomm!” the glamrocks repeated.

They droned on for a while longer following the head’s lead but then gradually became quiet and turned their gaze to the maid inside the circle. Matilda stood completely at a loss not knowing what to do with herself. They clearly expected her to do something. It was time to take urgent action and as she correctly surmised, it had to be something extraordinary as her authority had diminished rapidly in the presence of the glamorc.

She was also desperate for the toilet. Matilda could not understand what kind of head this was, whether it was alive, and if so, why it was growing out of the monolith. As she watched, it continued to mumble and grimace. Then Matilda spotted something mechanical about the head. It was periodically repeating the same movements over and over again in a cycle.

She had nothing to lose. It was now or never. If she did not take the situation into her own hands this very second, she was finished. Without further hesitation, Matilda climbed up onto the altar, undid the zipper on her jumpsuit, crouched down and relieved herself right on top of the talking head.

The glamrocks stared at her completely dumbfounded, a look of indescribable horror appearing on their faces, formerly devoid of any facial expression. They observed the entire spectacle without making a single sound. Having completed the sacrilege, the diva rose and calmly zipped herself back up again. In that moment, the head began sending out sparks, then it twitched and with a fading mumble stalled, completely paralyzed in a pitiful grimace.

Matilda understood now. Standing on the plinth, she gave the savages a triumphant look. Their glamorc was defeated. After an initial pause, Matilda asked them the sacred question they had already heard before.

“Who is mana here?”

“Mana-tida! Mana-tida!” the glamrocks cried out. The sound of their voices faded and then again, they cried. “You are our new mana!”

In this instant, the glamrocks fell to their knees wiping their faces across the floor as before. Matilda climbed down from the plinth and began to give orders.

“Stop! Get up! Really, get up, I tell you!”

The glamrocks rose to their feet and surrounded her still keeping a respectful distance. The diva was finally herself again and asked, “So, what are we going to do?”

“…’ead gibb’ish! …’ead gibb’ish!” the gray ones shouted. The dead head did not seem to interest them anymore. They stared in awe at their new mana ready to follow any order she might give them.

Matilda stopped and thought for a moment. She had just escaped a terrible fate, finding a way out of what she had assumed to be a hopeless situation. She had never experienced anything like this ever in her life before, and naturally, could never have imagined herself capable of coping with such a crisis. But events were developing so rapidly, she did not have time to be surprised or celebrate.

As before, Matilda faced a multitude of unresolved questions: what was the head? What was this building, this town? Who built it all and why? What was this world in which she found herself? Whoever the architects were, it definitely was not the glamrocks. Judging from what she had seen, the head was an electrical mechanism that served as a means of shackling these primitive people. Now the head was broken but the source of energy that had fed it was clearly still active as the monolith continued to emit its green glow.

The main thing was to work out what on earth Matilda was going to do next. If these people were primitive, there was no telling what they might come up with. That meant she had to occupy their minds with something resembling a ritual, otherwise they might become disobedient to her. Having considered the circumstances, clever Matilda (and she was undoubtedly very clever) decided to start by establishing some kind of bond with the gray ones.